Marco Rubio once warned that “a con artist is about to take over the Republican party and the conservative movement,” referring to Donald Trump. Now, he serves as his secretary of state.
Rubio made those remarks during a “CBS This Morning” interview as a senator from Florida running against Trump as he ran for his first term as president. The two were in the middle of bitter primary for the Republican nomination.
He said at the time he was convinced that the media was “pumping him up because he will be easy to beat in November” and that a Trump administration would be “chaos.”
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“He is wholly unprepared to be president of the United States,” he said. “This is the most important government job on the planet. We’re about to turn over the conservative movement to a person who has no ideas of any substance on the important issues, the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual.”
Rubio: You grow to appreciate Trump “in time”
Rubio joined Trump’s cabinet as secretary of state in 2025 -Credit:AFP via Getty Images
The relationship between Rubio and Trump changed dramatically in the years that followed. In 2022, Rubio, who running for another term in the Senate, invited Trump at a closing rally in Miami. The former president told the audience “You need Marco Rubio fighting for you in the US Senate. He is fantastic.”
Since his primary battle with Trump, Rubio said he took that experience as a lesson.
“I got to go to places I’d never been and meet people I’d never interacted with and realized there’s millions of millions of Americans out there for whom the American dream I believed in and was so enthusiastic about, a lot of them thought it was increasingly out of reach,” He told CNN. “They’d lost their jobs because they got sent to China. They lived in a town where everywhere some shuttered factory or boarded-up Main Street shop reminded them of a once vibrant town that was hollowed out.”
“You know in time, you grow to appreciate how Trump gave voice to that sentiment that needed to be heard and that needed to transform our party,” he added.
Rubio a “total Donald Trump follower”
Rubio said he has moved past the campaign attacks from Trump -Credit:Getty Images
As an up-and-comer of the Republican party early in his career, Rubio was seen as a center-right politician who could appeal to voters traditionally out of reach from the GOP. His critics see his role in today’s Trump administration as a flip-flop.
“He’s made a 180-degree transition from being a center-right Republican with certain issues he championed like immigration, to becoming a total Donald Trump follower,” Al Cardenas, a former Florida Republican Party chairman, said. “He’s not the only one who made the transition.”
Rubio defends his reversal by saying that he didn’t really know Trump as a person when he was running for president. With time he got to know him and move past the campaign attacks.
“That is like asking a boxer why they punched somebody in the face in the third round. It’s because they were boxing. Doesn’t mean you hate the guy, but we were in a competition for the same job,” Rubio said. “Maybe other people are different, but if he was a Democrat and we had a tough campaign wouldn’t everybody be insisting we come back and work together, right? So why not expect that and then some when it’s a Republican?”